The Trouble with AI Art

Does the modern age have room for the soul?

Preface: Before I start, I am no anti-technologist. My first degree was in technology, I find LLM’s and Weak AI interesting, I also find Strong AI disconcerting. This conversation engages the artist part of me, for the explicit term ‘AI Art’ is the term being used, I think that is a mistake.

Let’s have a conversation—

What is art? It might be a good idea to differentiate it from other words we often use in place of it: design, entertainment, advertisement, novelty, or critique. These may approach art, or have artful elements, but fundamentally they are in a different category than art, I would say.

Now pertaining to art, a materialist may say that art is only aesthetics, whereas the theist might say that aesthetics are a toolkit that the artist uses to approach the transcendental, to approach something we call Beauty. Now I will focus (as I am a Christian) primarily on the second framing belief: that art is approaching the transcendental. I mean that art, no matter its social benefits and aims, is primarily aimed at something that is higher than any of us.

“Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.” — Rembrandt van Rijn

And this is the differentiator between art and the others in the list above. Design, entertainment, advertisement, novelty, or critique may use artful elements, but they are concerned with life in the mundane. And when I say the mundane, I mean the regular—and if we go too far, and live without the transcendental—the mystical, at all, we end up with only the earthly, what Taylor called ‘the imminent frame:’ existence buffered from the transcendent. Activity in the mundane may claim that this is what existence is. But art, if left big and not flattened down into only aesthetics, would touch what existence means.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Pablo Picasso

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” — Francis Bacon

So let’s focus this discussion in a little bit. As someone who works at attempting to create art, I believe there is a powerful redefinition taking place presently, it is this: that art and advertising are essentially the same thing. An easy example can be seen on artistic social media accounts where artists are continually urged to produce more and more while sacrificing quality all in the name of ‘brand building’ or attention grabbing. The artist is also encouraged to be more important than the work itself. I have received messages again and again that go like this, ‘people want to know the artist, so get out there, make it more about you!’ Why? Why is it so important to know the artist if it is true art being made?

What is art? What is advertising?

Maybe it is a good idea to consider what art is first—

We say cave paintings from locations like Sulawesi Island are cave ‘art,’ perhaps the first ever made by human hands in fact. We generally attribute art to being something that tells a story. But a story isn’t simply a collection of events. A story is a collection of events mediated through the human mind and human soul. We feel their meaning in the narrative flow, and tell it in a way that is not simply constrained to the bare collection of events, but has something more. There, in the best stories, is something that appeals to the core part of us that we call ‘the human part.’ A hunting scene on a cave wall tells not just of dinner, but of heroism, thankfulness, perhaps the weird, and gives space to contemplation of existence itself. You may think this all smacks of being a bit overzealous, but perhaps it is not my insistence, but our current insistence on the mundanity of every day events that has retuned our attention.

Art means something that extends beyond the life of the artist, would it not be only self-serving otherwise? We didn’t start going to art museums to view artist’s pet projects, we went because the work meant something wider, they connected with the human within us. The work tells us something of who we are. There might be mechanisms like aesthetics, form, expertise, skill. But to the unknowing viewer, they don't need to know art theory or history to feel that this piece before them means something to them. It makes them pause. it interrupts the mundanity.

“It's not what you look at that matters,

it's what you see.” — Henry David Thoreau

Yet we have begun to forget this. Now onto the second item. We have made the calamitous error of thinking that advertisement is art. Yet advertisement is story-constrained, without the lines that lead to, or approach, the transcendent. It stays within the mundane. Instead of telling us who we are, it simply tells us what we need. If we consider Maslow’s Higherarchy of Needs, we see the elements that make survival more than possible, it makes it comfortable. But that’s not the same thing as knowing what to live for. The internet has accelerated this overall project. We no longer have time for interruption, we need to stay relevant. We no longer have time for reflection upon who we are, we are bombarded all the time with what we need to do—and cleverly, the products themselves promise fulfillment. Art has been demoted to entertainment for the consumer, and advertisement for the artist.

And so if this is the situation, then to stay relevant, the artist has to produce more and reflect less, produce more and be interrupted less. The field became ripe for expediency, for optimization. Why not cheat a little? Why not let the machines do it? These are questions born from art being degraded down. It exists in a state where the process—the struggle for art—the interruption itself—is seen as a negative, or at very least, not optimal. Are we making art, or simply fodder for the infinite scroll and our diminishing attention spans?

And so the people stopped being interrupted and started accepting imitations.

Are we to lose ourselves without a fight? ‘That was the death of art, the tradition that had run 50,000 years brought down by expediency, by optimization—it went so quietly.’

We might say ‘well, isn’t AI a good tool?’ And it might be, but with a strong temptation. We shouldn’t think about it like the advent of a new musical instrument upon which our skill is applied: a grand piano evolving into a keyboard, one sound growing into many choices of sound for the artist. It would be better to consider it as a conventional piano over against a player-piano playing away without the need for a human at the controls at all. If my goal is only in the mundane, why not create a thousand player pianos to play a thousand clubs on the same night and I make the money that came without the struggle, optimized. It’s just good business. Now if we extend that theoretical line out with greater technologies, when does music cease and an approximation of music begin? And where along the road are we lost, and where along that road are we willing to struggle again with learning the expertise of being musicians? Or is it only ever business?

Art, engaging with Beauty, has a social utility, but it is a utility brought down from the transcendental to the immanent, it isn’t trying to bootstrap the immanent up to the transcendental, like some great tower.

Circumambulate. We might say that the job of the artist is to walk around the handshake between Beauty and the soul of humanity and, if they do their job, reveal a facet of it in their work; yet to do that they had to walk around it in themselves, before the struggle to materialize it in their craft could take place. But the craft and their materializing is the local part, the idea being expressed or the beauty being engaged is the transcendental part. But the transcendental element cannot be faked, it must be approached, otherwise the audience will understand it is only craft alone. The piece needs a soul and the artist only has their own to impart, their own that approached Beauty. This again is the trouble with the idea of the artificial artist.

“Beauty will save the world” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Art has the ability to awaken the wonder that was indicative in childhood while marrying it to the learning, wisdom, and experience that has been tended to in adulthood. It is the bringing together of the whole self, even if we are not fully aware of it. And yet it seems to me, that as art is made by an artist—the activity and end product is conceived by a specific point of view. Artificial art is a composite, it is in a very real way perspectiveless, and so even if it awakes wonder, it is a truncated wonder. It cannot be as real because it is not wonder stirred in the artist, lifting them perilously to then create the piece. The motive is different for the AI, the motive there is to ‘stir wonder upon precedent.’ The activity goes from ‘discovering ineffable truth’ about the world, and descends into ‘stirring the feeling of discovering ineffable truth—as it has been described before,’ it ceases to be a transcendental activity, as it engages in the imitation of one. In attempting to more regularly create the art that stirs us, it has in reality taken us farther from it with an added degree of separation. Where once we as the viewer of art embodied different perspectives through the art of the artist, soul resonating with soul, we now embody a mathematical composite.

Real beauty is in a way something participated in but not drawn attention to. We of course have a sense of the sublime when we are in it. But that is not quite what I am talking about. Beauty, if kept wild, is a potent force—a real sunset, for example, is like this: it is beauty that stops the viewer, it interrupts them. But to hijack the beauty of a sunset is to collapse it, to make it cliché. To hijack beauty is to be too aware of the beauty. We see this in those ridiculous drug commercials of a nice couple walking on a beach at sunset. Without agenda the scene would be beatific, but with agenda, with the ‘look at me’ over-awareness, it decays into comedic salesmanship. AI art is very much like this, it exists (without effort or struggle) as only synthetic peacock feathers serving a larger goal of presentation. It is too aware. There is no innocence. AI is the black mirror that serves to only reflect our own desires back to ourselves—can we say in good faith it isn’t the apogee of our self-serving humanity? It is our creation, and our ego, our pool of Narcissus giving us our obsessions, perhaps even tempting us with our fears, without the risk or sublimity of approaching that which isn’t us. In its arms we might experience the comforting embrace that will be the tomb of our imaginative souls.

•••

I want to end with this excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance speech in which he grapples with Dostoevsky’s “Beauty will save the world.”

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes – but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition – and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?